Dannel Malloy, the governor of Connecticut, has told Washington "to get
its act together" and pass legislation banning assault weapons like the
one used at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Mr Malloy joined a growing and increasingly urgent chorus of voices calling for stricter gun laws and a clampdown on the high-capacity magazines that allowed Adam Lanza to fire dozens of rounds without needing to reload.

"These guns are not used to hunt deer," the. "I'm a big believer in hunting rights and a big believer in supporting the Second Amendment but there's a reality that this stuff has going too far and is too easy to own."

He said that the high-capacity magazines were "extremely dangerous" and that laws limiting rifle clips to 10 rounds could have made a "significant" difference in limiting the scale of the massacre.

Although Connecticut has stricter gun laws than many other states, Mr Malloy said "that no state would ever be safe" until national limits were in place because weapons move so easily across state lines.

"Do I think Washington DC needs to get its act together and enact stricter gun control laws at the federal level? You bet I do.

The governor briefly wept as he described his decision to end parents' false hope that their children might still emerge from the school alive. "I made the decision that to have that go on any longer was wrong," he said.

"You try to feel their pain but you can't. You try to find some words that you hope will be adequate, knowing that they will be inadequate and you see little coffins and your heart has to break," he said.

Mr Malloy said he was calling for a statewide moment of silence on Friday morning, when 26 bells would toll to mark the 26 dead at the school.